Emilija Stojmenova

Assisted living solutions for the elderly through interactive TV

In this paper we present an application called Med-reminder, which extends the functionality of existing devices providing interactive TV and helps to increase the quality of life for the elderly. The Med-reminder application is used to remind people to take their medicines correctly and on time or to call a relative or a medical person in an emergency situation. Since the graphical user interface was adapted for the elderly, Med-reminder is easy to use without previous training. For evaluating the graphical user interface, navigation and the general usability of the application, and hence the identification of key aspects that increase the adoption rate of assisted living applications among the target population, a methodology for a user evaluation study was designed and conducted. User evaluation study results are presented in the paper.

Adapted User-Centered Design: A Strategy for the Higher User Acceptance of Innovative e-Health Services

Being familiar with all the benefits of e-Health and the strategic plan for the Slovenian health sector’s informatization, Telekom Slovenia and the Faculty of Medicine from the University of Maribor, along with other partners, have initiated an e-Health project. The project group is developing various e-Health services that are based on modern ICT (information and communications technology) solutions and will be available on several screens. In order to meet the users’ needs and expectations and, consequently, achieve the high acceptance of e-Health services, the user-centered design (UCD) approach was employed in the e-Health project. However, during the research it was found that conventional UCD methods are not completely appropriate for older adults: the target population of the e-Health services. That is why the selected UCD methods were modified and adapted for older adults. The modified UCD methods used in the research study are presented in this paper. Using the results of the adapted UCD methods, a prototype for a service named MedReminder was developed. The prototype was evaluated by a group of 12 study participants. The study participants evaluated the MedReminder service as acceptable with a good potential for a high adoption rate among its target population, i.e., older adults.

Editorial: ambient media as metaphor for creating new experiences and user interfaces

“Ambient Media” are a fundamentally new way how to define media in the ubiquitous era, and are contribute to the field of human-computer-interaction (HCI), computer science, experience design, media management, and media studies. Ambient Media have been defined, explored, and conceptualized in [2–5, 10]. This special issue devotes to the exploration of phenomena of ambient media, in particular on aspects of search and retrieval, interactive interfaces, designing experiences, applying new interaction concepts, the design of experiences, educational issues, and the future prospective of this novel media form. For this special issue, we accepted six papers exploring these issues. A very special feature of this special issue is, that the contributing authors collaboratively worked on the analysis of the containing articles. This article shall give a holistic overview of the current status of Ambient Media, and outlines its potential future till 2020. The paper contributed by A. Scherp contributes with the aspect of search of open social media data via mobile phones. Interactive user interfaces are explored by M. Golja in his work, and particularly addresses the design of interfaces for digital interactive TV and their limitations. New learning strategies, and especially how libraries transform from their analogue to their digital counterpart has been explored by M. Bilandzic. Experience as a phenomena in social living contexts as e.g. at home, has been explored by D. Obal, who devoted his research to the Multimed Tools Appl (2014) 71:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s11042-014-1899-0

MedReminder - an interactive multimedia medical application for the IPTV environment

We present the MedReminder, an interactive multimedia medical application, integrated into an existing IPTV service framework. The MedReminder application is implemented within XBMC multimedia platform and is integrated alongside interactive TV live and on demand multimedia services, providing easy to use and intuitive user experience. It is a client-server based application connecting different target user roles: doctors as medicine prescribers, patients as medicine consumers and patient caregivers. It allows for a centralized collection of medicine related reminder information. Consequently, the system provides user notifications on TV screen and through other communication channels, such as SMS messages, e-mail and telephone calls, which are used in case the consumption of prescribed medicine has not been confirmed. Several use case scenarios are discussed including the possibility of dynamic medicine prescriptions, based on doctors remote readings of patients medical parameters (e.g. blood pressure, body weight, temperature etc.), using the integrated personal health system.

Capturing the mood: Evaluation of the moodstripe and moodgraph interfaces

This study presents an evaluation of two interfaces for gathering user feedback in online surveys. We evaluated the intuitiveness, usability and time complexity of the proposed interfaces in comparison to the more standard approaches. Over 900 users first participated in an online survey exploring the influence of mood on their emotional responses to music and colors. We included several new interfaces in this survey, so after it was completed, users were asked to complete a second survey where they evaluated various aspects of the interfaces. Our analysis shows reduced time complexity and increased intuitiveness of the new interfaces, compared to standard approaches, resulting in lower mental difficulty and frustration of participants.

Interactive TV user interfaces: how fast is too fast?

The analysis presented in this paper is the search for optimal scrolling speeds of the user interface for interactive TV (iTV) navigation. The most popular navigation techniques for browsing through user interfaces usually incorporate scrolling. Furthermore, the latest set-top-boxes have enough processing power to support very fast scrolling, not only for texts, but also for photographs and other elements. We designed and performed an experiment to measure the optimal scrolling speed for different activities on a user interface. We found that the optimal speed depends on the type and complexity of the navigational elements (like text or graphics). We discovered that less-complex elements, such as numbered TV-channel names, tolerate much higher scrolling speeds than more-complex elements, such as graphical elements like movie posters. We also analyzed the impact of the direction of navigation (vertical, horizontal) on the optimal speeds and the results show no major impact on the graphical elements, while for the text elements the difference is obvious. The results of this study can improve the usability of the horizontal and vertical navigation techniques in modern iTV navigation.

Ambient bloom: new business, content, design and models to increase the semantic ambient media experience

Semantic ambient media are the novel trend in the world of media reaching from the pioneering subareas such as ambient advertising to the new and emerging subareas such as ambient assisted living. They will likely shape the upcoming years in terms of modeling smart environments and also media consumption and interaction. This work analyzes semantic ambient media by considering business models, content and media, interaction design and consumer experience, and methods and techniques that are important to create this new form of media. Discussion is led using the state-of-the-art event of the semantic ambient media, which is the annual international workshop on Semantic Ambient Media Experience (SAME). The study also creates a vision for how ambient media will evolve and how they will look like in the future decade.

Information Systems and Management in Media and Entertainment Industries

This book defines an agenda for research in information management and systems for media and entertainment industries. It highlights their particular needs in production, distribution, and consumption. Chapters are written by practitioners and researchers from around the world, who examine business information management and systems in the larger context of media and entertainment industries. Human, management, technological, and content creation aspects are covered in order to provide a unique viewpoint. With great interdisciplinary scope, the book provides a roadmap of research challenges and a structured approach for future development across areas such as social media, eCommerce, and eBusiness. Chapters address the tremendous challenges in organization, leadership, customer behavior, and technology that face the entertainment and media industries every day, including the transformation of the analog media world into its digital counterpart. Professionals or researchers involved with IT systems management, information policies, technology development or content creation will find this book an essential resource. It is also a valuable tool for academics or advanced-level students studying digital media or information systems.

Towards a Personalised and Context-Dependent User Experience in Multimedia and Information Systems

Advances in multimedia and information systems have shifted the focus from general content repositories towards personalized systems. Much effort has been put into modeling and integration of affective states with the purpose of improving overall user experience and functionality of the system. In this chapter, we present a multi-modal dataset of users’ emotional and visual (color) responses to music, with accompanying personal and demographic profiles, which may serve as the knowledge basis for such improvement. Results show that emotional mediation of users’ perceptive states can significantly improve user experience in terms of context-dependent personalization in multimedia and information systems.

DEMOLA - Globalni primer dobre prakse za inovacije in prenos znanja v prakso

Pobuda, imenovana Demola, je nastala v finskem mestu Tampere. Kdor mesto pozna, ve, da je to zelo inovativno okolje, kjer ima sedež veliko naprednih in visokotehnoloskih podjetij. Prav ta podjetja so spodbudila nastanek prvih projektov v okviru Demole. Zanimalo jih je, kako na njihove storitve in resitve, ki jih ponujajo na trgu, gledajo mladi ter kako bi se z njihovimi vsakodnevnimi problemi in izzivi spopadli posamezniki, ki niso obremenjeni s tem, kaj »se da« in cesa se »ne da«, ter ob tem tudi ne poznajo zgodovine podjetja, panoge in podobno. Podjetja so opisala svoje izzive in jih predala v resevanje multidisciplinarnim ekipam studentov.